For decades
folks in white coats have confidently assured the public that shunning
fatty foods " bacon and eggs, butter, steak " would make for longer,
healthier lives. Well, guess what? In "The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,"
published in the March 30 issue of the leading journal Science, science
writer Gary Taubes recounts a situation eerily suggestive of Woody Allen's
movie Sleeper. In one scene of the 1970's film, a doctor of the future
is incredulous when told that 20th-century medicine considered fatty
foods and other dietary taboos to be unhealthy. "Precisely the opposite
of what we now know to be true," he muses.

Not exactly
the opposite, but certainly different. Taubes reports that several very
large studies designed to nail down the link between leaner cuisine
and longer life have given ambiguous results. Worse, the link never
was strong in the first place. Rather, through the combined influence
of some zealous scientists and crusading bureaucrats, as well as the
ascendancy of a less-is-more philosophy, in the 1970s, cholesterol "
a substance found naturally in every cell in your body "was labeled
"bad for you." The message, sclerosed into dogma, was taught to school
children and consumers throughout the land.

Whatever
future work on nutrition may find, here are two questions to keep in
mind while watching "Evolution":

1. If
it's so difficult to pinpoint the causes of a single, very specific
biological process " heart disease in modern humans " where you can
study living specimens who walk into your laboratory, then why shouldn't
we expect to have considerably more trouble identifying the causes
of the general development of life in the distant past?

2. If,
in the teeth of uncertain or contradictory data, social forces in
science and society manufactured a consensus about what constitutes
a good diet, why shouldn't we expect much more pressure to impose
an artificial consensus about who we are and where we come from?

The PBS
series is oblivious to the first question and is part of the problem
with the second. Natural selection, we are serenely and frequently assured,
must be " has to be " the cause of evolution. But the evidence we are
shown is as thin as a fat-free meal. We learn that the premier evidence
that natural selection built all of biology is HIV " the virus that
causes AIDS. You see, HIV mutates and becomes resistant to drugs, so
evolution happens! What need for further questions? No one involved
with the series seems to have noticed that, after repeated mutation,
fierce competition and natural selection of an enormous number of viral
particles in many millions of sufferers, we still have HIV " not a discernibly
different virus. So does this actually demonstrate the limits to natural
selection, rather than unlimited possibilities? And can we really extrapolate
the results of simple drug-resistance in a virus to the development
of enormously complex biological traits in every phylum throughout time?
The film doesn't go there. "Evolution" entertains no doubts.

The essential
mark of an unbiased presentation is whether it addresses opposing views
accurately, in their strongest forms. Propaganda, on the other hand,
ignores or caricatures its opponents, or gives weak, watered-down renditions
of their arguments. "Evolution" trumpets not just evolution (descent
with modification) in general, but Darwinism (random mutation and natural
selection) in particular. Yet the show can't even bring itself to mention
that some scientists and academics " plus the vast majority of the public
" are profoundly skeptical of natural selection as the driver of evolution.
For example, consider Stuart Kauffman. Kauffman is one of the leading
lights in a group of scientists exploring complexity theory " roughly,
the idea that complex systems can organize themselves " explicitly as
an alternative to natural selection. His work has been widely discussed
both in scientific and popular periodicals. But no mention is made of
Kauffman or his colleagues in the seven-hour series. On the screen,
the only people who doubt Darwinism are biblical literalists.

And that's
the take-home message. While ostensibly about science, it's plain that
the overriding purpose of the series " financed in its entirety by Microsoft
billionaire Paul Allen " is to change people's religious beliefs. The
series wallows in religion " from the fictional opening scene, where
Robert FitzRoy, captain of the H.M.S. Beagle, banters with Charles Darwin
about Noah's Ark, through the choice of Handel's Messiah as a supposed
example of human creativity driven by sexual selection, to the closing
program "What About God?" Through many, many unsubtle clues, we learn
there is good religion " incarnated in a down-the-line Darwinist professor
shown receiving communion " and bad religion " represented by fundamentalist
Ken Ham, whose supporters are shot in choir robes and sing their objections
to evolution. Good religion cheerfully accommodates Darwinism. Bad religion
doesn't.

Early in
the series, Boston University biologist Chris Schneider remarks that
the sweep of evolution "stirs the soul." (But the souls of traditional
believers are shaken, not stirred.) My advice is, beware of scientists
with stirred souls! If they can go off half-cocked to give you a healthy
diet, they surely will do so to give you a healthy soul. The best reaction
to such overweening concern might be to enjoy the many beautiful nature
scenes in "Evolution" while eating a cheeseburger.

--

Michael
J. Behe is professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1978. His current research involves delineation of
design and natural selection in discrete subsystems of DNA replication.
In addition to publishing over 35 articles in refereed biochemical journals
he has also written editorial features in The New York Times, Boston
Review, the American Spectator and National Review. His book, "Darwin's
Black Box" (The Free Press, 1996) discusses the implications for Neo-Darwinism
of what he calls "irreducibly complex" biochemical systems. The book,
which went through twelve printings before being issued in paperback,
has been cited and reviewed internationally in over one hundred publications,
and was recently named by National Review and World magazine as one
of the one hundred most important books of the 20th century. He has
presented and debated his work at various conferences, including at
the State University of New York, Stony Brook, the University of Notre
Dame, Princeton University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and
Cambridge University. Besides many radio and television interviews,
in 1997, he was featured on two episodes of the PBS program "Technopolitics".